WordPress Pagination: Link To Next and Previous Pages Instead of Page Numbers with NextPage

We began to use our self-hosted WordPress’ nextpage feature to split individuals post into several pages, which gave us 75% what we really wanted; instead of links to the next and previous pages in the sequence, it was offering a list of page-numbered links that pointed to each individual page into which the main post was split, like so:

1… 2… 3… 4… 5….

Depending on your site’s needs, you may prefer to have a linked list of all the pages that made up the entire post. However, we needed to split the posts and provide a simpler solution for our users: a set of links that point to the NEXT PAGE the PREVIOUS PAGE. This way, our readers could easily traverse our posts in the order intended by the author, like so:

PREVIOUS PAGE… NEXT PAGE…

If you used the nextpage feature to split a single posts into multiple pages and find yourself stuck with page numbers you’d prefer to get rid of, then you can follow these simple steps to display PREVIOUS PAGE / NEXT PAGE links instead:

Use CTRL+F to search the page contents to locate the function: wp_link_pages

Inside wp_link_pages, you should set the parameter: next_or_number=next

Voila! Now, when you use nextpage, WordPress will output Next Page and Previous Page links for a smoother blogging experience. Navigate to this post see how we implemented this feature. You can use this as a reference if you have trouble; feel free to leave any questions below!